


Lipgloss

by melondery



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst, Blonde Mark, Childhood Friends, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, it got angsty because i’m incapable of writing something that doesn’t involve angst, jaemin likes it more, mark likes his lipgloss, self discovery, tan mark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 19:43:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20840981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melondery/pseuds/melondery
Summary: Mark wears a new lipgloss, and Jaemin DEFINITELY notices.





	Lipgloss

Jaemin didn’t know when it happened. Maybe it was in first grade, when the new boy in class lent him a pencil. Or third grade, when that same boy enthusiastically claimed that Jaemin was his best friend in the world. Or seventh grade, when the boy jokingly asked Jaemin to slow dance at the spring formal. Maybe it was in sophomore year, when the boy got a girlfriend and Jaemin’s stomach twisted in ways it never had before, not even when his parents split up or when he thought he was going to live with his mom in America. Or maybe, just maybe, it was that night, at the junior prom, when Jaemin found his best friend crying in the bathroom over the girl that stood him up; the night that Jaemin held the boy close and whispered reassurances in his ear and brought him home and cuddled him to sleep. All Jaemin knew is that somewhere along the way, he had fallen deeply, irreversibly in love with Mark Lee.

\---

The first day of senior year, Jaemin knew he was in trouble. He walked into his first class and almost didn’t recognize Mark; sometime in the few weeks since Jaemin had last seen him, Mark had dyed his hair blond- and it worked. Too well. Jaemin slid into the seat next to Mark and tried his very best to not make a fool of himself as his lifelong best friend greeted him.  
“Hey Jaemin, how was the rest of your summer? I wish you could’ve come to the beach with me, it would’ve been so much more fun with you there,”   
Mark continued to ramble about his beach experience, and Jaemin barely heard him. He was too busy staring at Mark’s delicate lips as they moved. His delicate lips, soft lips, kissable lips, sparkly- wait, sparkly?  
“M-Mark,” Jaemin tried to repress the shakiness in his voice to little avail.  
“What’s up?”  
“Are you wearing… lipgloss?”  
Mark’s hand raised involuntarily to his lips.   
“Oh, this? Yeah, I was shopping for highlighter and the clerk at the makeup store gave me a free sample of lipgloss; he said it was my color or something. He was actually kind of cute- what was his name again, Jisung or something? I don’t know, but I think he goes here. I’ve never seen him in my classes though so I can’t be sure, but he seemed familiar.”  
Mark kept talking, but Jaemin got distracted, once again, by his sparkling pink lips. The clerk at the store had been right, this sheer, light pink was definitely Mark’s color, especially now that Mark had tanned at the beach and changed his hair. It even went with Mark’s outfit; the blond was wearing a cropped, white t-shirt with the Polaroid logo on it that Jaemin swore he’d seen on a mannequin at American Eagle, and he’d paired it with baggy, light-wash jeans, a red, cloth belt, and red, hi-top Converse. It was really the best look Jaemin had ever seen, and he suddenly started to feel underdressed in his plain black t-shirt and basic jeans. Maybe having cotton-candy hair wasn’t enough to attract Mark’s attention, maybe Jaemin had to do more. Maybe he’d make his older brother take him shopping-  
“Jaemin, are you still listening?” Mark asked, and Jaemin’s head snapped back up.  
“Huh? I mean, of course I am,” Jaemin prayed to whatever deity there might have been that he wasn’t blushing.  
“So do you think we can do the study group for this class like we did last year? It would be super helpful for me since you’re so smart and yet so easy to understand when you explain things,” Mark ran his hand through his hair, almost bashfully.   
“Oh, yeah, totally! Just let me know whenever you wanna meet up, and I can invite the other guys if you want,” Jaemin replied. His gaze caught Mark’s and just for a second, he thought he saw a flash of disappointment. Then again, maybe he was seeing only what he wanted to see.  
“Sure, you can invite the others too,” Mark laughed awkwardly. Jaemin wanted to say something, anything to assuage the embarrassment rising in his core, but the bell rang, class began, and he was left to wordlessly admire Mark’s fingers and wrists and little doodles in his brand new composition book while the teacher handed out the syllabus.

\---

As the first week of school continued, Jaemin felt more and more like he was drowning. He couldn’t pay attention in any of his classes; his brain seemed to think that Mark Lee’s flawless skin and dreamy eyes were far more important than stoichiometry or molarity or whatever the hell was going on in chemistry class at the time. Each minute that he sat beside Mark, each minute that his hand was inches away from Mark’s, each minute of the school day was agonizing. By the end of the week, he couldn’t look Mark in the eye for fear of blushing and revealing his secret.  
Saturday morning, Jaemin was awoken by a phone call. The heart emojis on his screen told him the caller was Mark. Jaemin took a deep breath and answered the phone.  
“Hello?” Jaemin tried his best not to sound raspy, but he’d just woken up and hadn’t had water since the previous night.  
“Hey, Jaem, are you free today?” Maybe it was the phone distorting Mark’s voice, or maybe it was just Mark’s morning voice, but he sounded hot. Really hot. Jaemin could almost see the grey sweatpants and baggy shirt that he knew Mark slept in, could almost see Mark’s scruffy blond hair mussed from sleeping. It was a lot to handle, and Jaemin didn’t know if he could do it.   
“Jaem? You still there?”  
“Oh, uh, yeah,” Jaemin’s face heated and he thanked the heavens that he wasn’t face to face with Mark at the moment.  
“So are you free today? I need to study for chem and calculus and I definitely can’t do it alone.”  
“Yeah, I don’t have any plans,” Jaemin replied softly, trying to sound normal.  
“Cool, I’ll be at your house in five minutes.”  
“Mark, your house is a ten minute drive away from mine.”  
“Yeah, and?”  
“Why did you call if you were gonna come anyways?”  
“I figured I’d give you a heads up,”  
“What if I had plans?”  
“You never have plans,” Mark giggled, and Jaemin’s heart soared at the sound. Outwardly, he scoffed at Mark.  
“See you in a few then, loser.”  
“See ya!”  
Mark hung up, and Jaemin dropped his phone on the bed. Everything felt so natural with Mark. It always had. That was the problem; they’d been friends since first grade. They were almost like brothers; they’d crash each others’ houses and hang out whenever they could, they changed in front of each other and shared all their secrets without a second thought. They were best friends. Jaemin couldn’t let himself ruin that.  
Shaking himself out of his thoughts, Jaemin realized that Mark was mere minutes away from his house, and he looked like shit. He figured that if he was gonna keep on his flannel pajama pants and ratty t-shirt, he may as well put on a touch of makeup. He wandered into his bathroom with an eyeshadow palette and started smearing glitter around his eyes, and meanwhile, his thoughts once again flitted to Mark; this time, Jaemin thought about all the different makeup looks he’d seen Mark try over the years. There had been the first attempts at makeup in fifth grade with the Justice brand glitter gel shadows, and the smudged eyeliner and bright lipsticks in middle school, and the perfect brows and nude colors all throughout high school- and now the sparkly lipgloss. The absolute bane of Jaemin’s existence, his fatal weakness. Every time Mark wore it, Jaemin almost fainted. It just complimented him so well, so much better than it would anyone else. Personally, Jaemin thought no one else should be allowed to wear that shade of lipgloss, that it should be Mark’s and only Mark’s. Mark was kind of like the god of lipgloss, Jaemin thought idly. Yes, that was fitting. The god of lipgloss and the god of fashion and the god of being absolutely fucking perfect.  
“Jaemin, why are you putting on makeup? We aren’t even going out, we’re just studying,”  
Jaemin almost thought he made the voice up. But no, that was real. Mark had come in without knocking and had made his way to Jaemin’s bathroom, and caught Jaemin right in the middle of doing his makeup. Jaemin’s heart sped up so quickly he thought it was going to explode right there in his chest.   
“Go out? Why would we go out- I mean- we’ve been friends for so long- but we- ummmmm-” Speaking in the face of panic had never been Jaemin’s forte. Internally, he kicked himself and hoped that Mark couldn’t understand him.  
“Go out as in go out of the house, not like a date or anything,” Mark laughed, and Jaemin was too mortified to catch the tone of embarrassment and maybe just a hint of sadness in Mark’s voice.   
“Ha, right, not a date or anything, that would be dumb,” Jaemin’s internal self-kicking intensified.  
“Dumb, right,” Mark was barely even smiling anymore, but Jaemin didn’t notice. He was too busy hating every fiber of his own being.  
“Soooo, studying?” Jaemin finally set down the eyeshadow brush that he’d been death-gripping.  
“Right, studying.” Mark moved towards Jaemin’s room with his bag and Jaemin followed.  
By the time they reached the room, Mark seemed back to normal. Jaemin did his best to seem normal as well. He needed that normality, that sense of grounding, that reminder that Mark was the same Mark he’d always been. Otherwise, Jaemin didn’t know if he could make it through this study session. He just had to focus on the schoolwork. Focus on the schoolwork, not on the way Mark’s eyes glazed over when he lost his train of thought doing a problem. Focus on explaining the concepts, not on the way Mark almost seemed to be daydreaming when he listened to Jaemin’s long-winded lectures. Jaemin tried so hard to focus that he completely forgot what he was talking about. Instead of math, his head was filled with Mark’s lazy smile, and Mark’s gentle eyes, and the way the sunlight gleamed off of Mark’s neck and hair like he was carved from the brightest of diamonds. Most of all, he noticed the way Mark kept nodding his head, ever so slightly, long after Jaemin had trailed off.   
“Mark?” Jaemin’s voice was almost a whisper.  
“Yeah?” Mark’s gaze came into focus, and Jaemin swore his cheeks were a little pinker than they had been before. Then again, maybe it was a trick of the light. Or a trick of his own mind.  
“You listening?”  
“Yeah,”  
“Then what did I say?”  
“Well, uh, after you find the antiderivative you… uh,” Mark smiled sheepishly. “Could you repeat yourself?”  
“Are you having trouble focusing?” Jaemin couldn’t help but stare at Mark’s lips. He was wearing that damn lipgloss again.  
“A little bit,” This time, the blush rising in Mark’s cheeks was too pronounced to be a trick of anything.  
“Mark?”  
“Yeah?”  
“What are you blushing for?”  
“Am I blushing?”  
“Yeah,”  
“Well…”  
Both boys trailed off; they had nothing left to say- that is, nothing they had they guts to say out loud.  
“So. Antiderivatives.” Jaemin forced himself to continue even as he felt himself get lost, once again, in every aspect of Mark.  
“Yeah, absolutely. Math.” Mark closed his eyes for just a second, and Jaemin found himself admiring Mark’s eyelashes. How were even Mark’s eyelashes perfect?  
“Anyways, after you take the antiderivative, you have to evaluate it on the correct interval, which you can find here,” Jaemin shook his head ever so slightly and pointed to the spot on the problem he was talking about.  
“Wait…” Mark’s voice sounded halfway between groggy and sensual. “Which number is which?”  
“You start the integral at the bottom number and finish it at the top one, so when you’re evaluating it you subtract…” Jaemin trailed off again as Mark placed a finger next to his on the piece of paper.  
“These numbers, right?”   
“Yeah, you start the integral at the bottom number and-” Jaemin halted as Mark cut him off.  
“You already said that part, silly,” Mark grinned. “What comes after that bit?”  
“Well, uh, you evaluate the antiderivative at both numbers and then subtract the one of the bottom number from the one of the top number, so it’ll look like this,” Jaemin grabbed his pencil from behind his ear and started writing out the problem.  
“You have really pretty handwriting,” Mark smiled ever so slightly when Jaemin paused the problem to look up at him. “It’s one of the many things I like about you,”  
“Things... you like... about me?” Caught off guard, Jaemin couldn’t find the words he wanted to say.  
“Yeah, like how you always wear those baggy sweaters and walk around with sweater paws, and how you always dye your hair those cute colors- the pink is my favorite so far, by the way- and how you stare at me when you think I’m not looking, and how you rushed to put on makeup before I came over, and how you’re so, absolutely, frustratingly oblivious.”  
“Oblivious?” Was all Jaemin could come up with. His brain cells, it seemed, had chosen that moment to take a vacation.  
“Completely and utterly oblivious. I told you I wanted you to help me study, and you said you would invite the guys. I said the guy at the makeup store was cute, and you nodded along even though I could see the disappointment in your eyes right before you zoned out and started checking me out for the fifteenth time that day. I made a ninety-five on the last calculus test, but I still came over to your house so that you could explain basic integrals to me. You, Na Jaemin, are absolutely fucking oblivious.”  
“So… what you’re saying is…” Jaemin trailed off. Again. His brain cells had not returned from their ill-timed vacation; they were currently cruising the Mediterranean while Jaemin struggled to comprehend what Mark had said.  
“I like you, you dumbass. I’ve liked you for a while now, and I kinda thought you didn’t like me back up until this year.”  
“How long have you…” While Jaemin failed to complete a full sentence, his brain cells sipped piña coladas and sunbathed.  
“Since junior prom, when you found me in the bathroom crying over my ex and you wouldn’t leave me alone until I smiled and we ended up falling asleep in each other’s arms. Or maybe before that- I guess I realized I liked you at prom, but the feelings were already there. Or something like that.”  
“I realized I liked you the first day of this school year.” Finally, Jaemin’s brain cells were back, refreshed from their lovely vacation, and ready to go. “I think I liked you before that, but it never occurred to me that I could like you like that, or really that I could like a guy like that, and I always got so jealous when you had girlfriends and my heart leaped when you walked into the room and I guess I just passed that off as platonic emotions. Like, if I saw a cute guy on the street, I figured I only noticed because I wanted to be like him. Or when I thought about how I never liked any girls, I just thought I had high standards. Like that one time, back in freshman year, when I kissed Jangmi because she asked me to and I didn’t know better and I wanted to look cool, I felt so grossed out afterwards- more than that. I just felt disgusting, like as a person. And that made me think I had commitment issues. So I spent a long time falling in love with you and not realizing it. I spent a long time thinking I admired you, or that you were just a super close friend. I thought that friends just made each others’ hearts race, or that I only liked seeing you shirtless because I was jealous of your body- but when I walked into class at the beginning of this week, and I saw you sitting there, in that goddamn outfit, wearing that goddamn lipgloss, something clicked. Something clicked, and even though I still haven’t come to terms with whatever the fuck my sexuality is, at the very least I know that all I want to do in the fucking world is kiss you til I can’t breathe.”  
Jaemin took a deep breath and all of a sudden, he could feel the tears running down his cheeks that he swore hadn’t been there before. In complete honesty, he had never talked that much about anything at all, much less his own sexuality. And his crush on Mark. Right, Mark was still there. Jaemin had almost forgotten he was talking to someone else.  
Jaemin looked up to see tears streaking Mark’s face as well. For once, Mark didn’t have anything to say. His chest heaved with almost imperceptible sobs, given away only by his raspy breathing and the tears dripping off his chin. Jaemin reached out and grabbed Mark’s hand. One-handedly, he moved all the schoolwork out of the way and inched forward on the bed, so that his knees were touching Mark’s, and he grabbed Mark’s other hand.  
“Whatever happens after this, wherever we end up in life, I just want you to know that you are so very special to me. Thank you for existing, for helping me find out who I am and find out what feels right and for teaching me what it’s like to be in love, really, truly in love, even if you didn’t realize it.”  
“Jaemin…” Mark smiled through the tears that were just barely beginning to slow down. “Thank you. Thank you for trusting me with all that, and for baring your soul to me, and for- for falling in love with me. For letting me be that person for you. For letting me in and letting me help you discover all the things you were afraid to know about yourself. For the record, you helped me realize I liked guys, too. At this point I’m pretty sure I’m bisexual, since I definitely still like girls, and I definitely like guys, but I honestly don’t know. All I know is that I am so fucking in love with you that it hurts.”  
Jaemin grinned. He let go of Mark’s hands just to reach for his shoulders, and pushed Mark all the way down onto the bed. He placed a hand beside Mark’s head, right on the edge of a pillow, and let his other hand rest on Mark’s cheek. Mark heated up from his core to the very tip of his nose as Jaemin lowered his face until he could feel Mark’s breath against his cheeks.  
“I hope you like the taste of lipgloss, Lee,”

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for skylar in the legendary homo garbage rats fic secret santa that didn’t take place at christmas! ily skysky🥰 check out my twt @renjungay


End file.
